Penelope (Penny) Muse Abernathy is a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Abernathy, a former executive with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, was the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina from 2008 to 2020. Her research focuses on the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States. She is author of several books and reports, including “News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?” (2020) and “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” (2018).